Reversing Rural Blight in the Catskills

By RICHARD D. LYONS

Published: October 11, 1987

FOR a century, the Beaverkill Valley in the Catskills has been a mecca for naturalists drawn by the great floral beauty covering the mountains, for sportsmen attracted by abundant turkey and deer, and especially for anglers who cast into its streams for the maddeningly elusive rainbow trout and then touted the region as a world-class fishing spot.

But rural blight caught up with the 25-mile-long Ulster County valley several decades ago as farming petered out, mobile homes and shacks proliferated on tiny plots and the area seemed headed toward the same sort of economic, social and esthetic disintegration that beset much of Appalachia.

Now, however, due to the efforts of some conservationists who slowly evolved into real-estate developers, the downward spiral of decay has been reversed. The valley is being returned to much of its original state as landowners sensitive to the ecology and willing to bear the costs of upgrading the region have been moving into it.

Chief among them is Laurance Rockefeller, the 43-year old son of Laurance S. Rockefeller and the nephew of the late Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller. He has acted as a sort of developer-patron and his decade-long efforts - as well as a personal investment of millions of dollars - is returning the Beaverkill again to what he proudly calls ''the peaceful valley,'' a place whose enthusiasts include Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Irving Berlin, the Dalai Lama and Dan Rather, who has bought land there.

Mr. Rockefeller is the guiding force behind a development named Beaverkill Falls - 36 homesites with more than a dozen houses in place, an inn that acts as a focal point and clubhouse, tennis courts, skiing and hiking trails and, above all, rights to fish the Beaverkill. The development is on 645 acres and may be the forerunner of several others in the area since Mr. Rockefeller has purchased about 5,000 acres in the region.

''I regard our actions as the most economical way to recycle the land back as closely as possible to what it had been a century ago,'' Mr. Rockefeller said. In effect, he and like-minded friends have been engaged in an unusual form of private rezoning. They have been putting strict environmental covenants on their land, and he has been assembling old farms and small holdings into larger tracts and then dividing the land into homesites that he sells after imposing covenants restricting the uses of the property.

The land recycling effort at the extreme western end of Catskill State Park apparently is the only major project of its kind in the Northeast. The only town is the hamlet of Lew Beach, 100 air miles and a three-hour drive from midtown Manhattan.

Mr. Rockefeller, who is an environmental lawyer, said he first went to the Beaverkill about a dozen years ago as the guest of John H. Adams. Mr. Adams owns a farm in the valley and is the executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a law firm that specializes in conservation.

In succeeding visits, Mr. Rockefeller said, he fell under the spell of the natural beauty of the area and became determined to return the valley as closely and economically as possible to its original state.

He pointed out that he alone was not responsible for the conservation efforts, noting that local environmental groups included half a dozen hunting and fishing clubs that have been in the area for a century, while more recent arrivals have been religious orders of Buddhists and Tibetans who own and preserve large tracts of land.

Such groups include the Salmo Fontinalis Club - the name is the Latin term for rainbow trout - the Timber Doodle Partnership, the Dai Busatsu Zendo and the Tibetan Study Center, whose manor the Dalai Lama has used as a retreat.

While a ''peaceful valley'' is indeed emerging again, so too is one of the most environmentally conscious land projects in the northeastern United States. The development has attracted such names as Mr. Rather, Federal Judge John M. Walker Jr. and Seymour Schweber, the electronics entrepreneur, as well as lawyers, conservationists and, as Mr. Rockefeller put it, ''several journalists whose faces do not grace the Evening News.''

''My house in the Beaverkill is the only bit of privacy that I have left,'' said Mr. Rather through a CBS network spokesman, declining to discuss his acquisition further.

MORE forthcoming, however, was Benjamin Wolkowitz, an officer in a Wall Street investment house who lives in suburban New Jersey. He said he and his wife, Lois, purchased a homesite there because ''it's like buying into a land bank.''

''For years we had been looking for an environmentally sound development to build a weekend home and we finally found it in the Beaverkill Valley,'' said Mrs. Wolkowitz. ''It was also an area we could afford, since we are not terribly wealthy people.

''I don't know of another area as close to the city that is so pristine, an area that has clean water for our two young children to swim in, and an area where my husband can fish quietly,'' she concluded.

Mr. Rockefeller said he views those buying homesites in the valley as ''fellow settlers'' whose concerns about conservation parallel his own. Indeed, conservation easements included in the sales contract of each homesite strictly limit the use of the land and include the area in the Beaverkill Conservancy, which is a not-for-profit corporation.